According to Dmitri Sidorenko, a member of the unregistered Other Russia party, the conflict began when an unknown assailant attempted to provoke him into a fight at Moscow’s Yuzhnaya metro station on the morning of August 3. He was then detained and brought to a police station, where a man presented himself as an FSB officer and showed a badge identifying him as Major Vladimir Aleksandrovich Belov.

The officer explained that he was interested in Sidorenko because of his involvement in the Strategy 31 protest campaign for free assembly. He then proposed that the activist become an informant and provide him with detailed information about the plans of Other Russia party leader and protest coordinator Eduard Limonov, promising “material compensation” in return.

The press release issued by the party states that Belov threatened Sidorenko with deportation to Belarus, where he is a citizen, after he refused. Conversely, if the activist accepted the offer, he would be granted Russian citizenship.

The police officer made it clear that Sidorenko would have problems at work if he declined the offer. He also told the activist that, “in the case of an incorrect decision,” he would lose his wife and two small children.

As an example, Belov mentioned Sidorenko’s sister-in-law, Olga Shalina, who is currently in a Nizhny Novgorod jail. The officer told him that her confinement was a result of “behaving badly.”

At the end of the conversation, Belov said that he would not bother Sidorenko in the coming days, but officers from the Center for Extremism Prevention (Center “E) probably would.

Protests under the Strategy 31 campaign have been held across the country by Russian oppositionists every month with a 31st day for the past few years, dedicated to the 31st article of the Russian constitution for freedom of assembly. Almost without exception, Moscow city authorities have refused to sanction the rallies, and they have almost all ended with numerous arrests.

On Tuesday, a user of the website HabraHabr living in Ulyanovsk complained that he was unable to access the LiveJournal blog of noted whistleblower Aleksei Navalny. When the user asked his internet provider, Telekom.ru, for an explanation, he received a letter in response: “Access to the resource navalny.livejournal.com has been temporarily suspended by order of the FSB.”

Upon further inquiry to Telekom.ru, Gazeta.ru discovered that the company had blocked access not only to Navalny’s blog, but to LiveJournal entirely.

“The company has limited access to LiveJournal by order of the FSB,” a technology support specialist from the company told Gazeta.ru. However, he could not explain on the basis of what sanction the FSB asked the company to block access to the website.

This is not the first time Russian authorities have blocked access to social media websites. In July 2010, an ISP in Komsomolsk-on-Amur received a court order to block access to YouTube; in the same month, a court in Ingushetia ordered providers to block access to all of LiveJournal.

Prominent blogger Aleksei Navalny has been involved in an ongoing row with government authorities in connection with his status as Russia’s chief whistleblower. Most notably, Navalny used his shareholder earnings in the state-owned oil pipeline company Transneft to reveal an alleged $4 billion of embezzlement. Last week, federal investigators filed criminal charges against the blogger for having allegedly defrauded a state-owned timber company. On Wednesday, investigators announced that an “unspecified culture studies institute” had determined that his website’s logo was a desecration of Russia’s coat of arms.

According to the Moscow Times, Telekom.ru is now blaming technical difficulties for the lack of access to LiveJournal, despite previously admitting that the FSB issued an order to block it. The FSB denies issuing a complaint about Navalny’s blog, but it is unclear whether or not they deny complaining about LiveJournal itself.

On April 6, Chief Aleksandr Andreechkin of the FSB Center for the Defense of Information and Government Communications told a session of the Government Commission on Federal Communications and Issues of Information Technology that the use of foreign means of encryption to provide telecommunication services in Russia has raised the concerns of the FSB and other security services. In particular, he noted the problem of how servers for the encryption of some of these services are located abroad. This includes, for example, Gmail, Hotmail, and the online telephone service Skype.

The FSB is concerned that the fact that these servers are located abroad makes it more difficult to carry out operational search activities through technical means.

According to Minister of Communications and Mass Media of the Russian Federation Igor Shchyogolev, the Russian security services see this as a threat to national security.

However, Deputy Minister for Networks and Mass Communications Ilya Massukh said the proposal did not find support among members of the commission.

As RIA Novosti reports, Massukh is confident that the services will not be banned.

“The position of the Minkomsvyaz is that we cannot ban anything from citizens, especially the Internet. We can propose some sort of means of encryption, but they should be free,” he said.

The civil servants have decided to create a working group to study the question of possibly banning popular services such as Gmail. The group has been ordered to prepare the conclusions of its research by October 1, 2011. The group will consist of representatives of relevant agencies and also, possibly, representatives of Rostelekom.

As Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported on January 13, officials in Russia’s Sverdlovskaya region banned the use of certain free email services and Skype in the wake of the Wikileaks scandal. The measures were taken on the recommendation of the FSB.

Russia: Freedom of Speech Online in 2010
By Marianna Tishchenko
February 10, 2011
Yezhednevny Zhurnal

With the Internet rising in influence as the single most important source of information (40% of Russian citizens use the Runet), the issue of online freedom of expression has become significantly more relevant. This year, the Internet became a platform for political and social mobilization in Russia. However, judging by the reaction of the Russian authorities, who strive to suppress activities in cyberspace, the government does not see online activism in a particularly positive light.

At the same time as ordinary Russians (who are, by the way, the most active users of social websites in the world) have begun to rely more heavily on the Internet, the government has also changed its priorities in regards to the global web.

Regional Blocking

Blocking websites is a practice used widely by government authorities, mainly on a regional level, to control Internet content. It must be noted that the particular nature of this method is that residents from one concrete region are blocked from seeing the same websites that everyone else can access as normal.

The most outrageous example of limits imposed on freedom of expression on the Internet was the decision of the Komsomolsk-on-Amur Central Regional Court about blocking the website YouTube by Internet provider Rosnet. The ban (which was never put into effect) was a reaction to a neo-Nazi video clip that was put on a “list of extremist materials.” Regardless of the fact that the court’s decision was later forgotten, the case itself is an example of the burgeoning interference by regional authorities over Internet content.

YouTube has not been the only online resource to suffer. At the end of July, a court in the Republic of Ingushetia required a local Internet provider to block access to LiveJournal. In August, a provider in Tula temporarily blocked access to the independent portal Tulskie Pryaniki.

There was an analogous case with the environmental website Ecmo.ru. A provider in the city of Khimki blocked user access to Ecmo.ru because it was hosting a petition calling for Khimki Mayor Vladimir Strelchenko to resign.

Physical and Virtual Violence

In addition to website blocking, the freedom of self-expression on the Internet has been influenced by threats of actual violence against bloggers. Well-known Russian journalist and blogger Oleg Kashin was attacked after he published a series of articles about youth movements and protests against the construction of a highway through the Khimki Forest.

In August, a criminal suit was filed in the Kemerovo region against Aleksandr Sorokin for a post in which he compared regional governors to Latin American dictators.

In November, Ulyanovsk activist and blogger Sasha Bragin became a target of the Russian justice system when he was accused of running over a pedestrian. Bragin said the accident was staged and that a criminal suit had already been filed after he was repeatedly threatened for his investigative work.

A series of criminal suits have been filed against neo-Nazi websites. According to the Sova Center, Komi resident Vladimir Lyurov was sentenced to six months probation for inciting hatred with anti-Semitic comments posted on a local forum. Lyurov has not admitted his guilt.

LiveJournal, which is controlled by Kremlin-allied oligarch Alisher Usmanov, wound up in the center of public attention after suspending their users’ accounts. Rakhat Aliev, a Kazakh opposition politician and ex-son-in-law of President Nazarbayev, had his blog frozen. Incidentally, at one point before then, all of LiveJournal was blocked in Kazakhstan. Blogger pilgrim_67 also had his account blocked, forcing him to “transfer” to BlogSpot and lj.rossia.org.

These cases have proven the instability of LiveJournal as a platform for the Russian political blogosphere.

Blogger accounts were not only closed, but hacked. In the past five years, more than 40 Runet blogs have been attacked.

This week, a group of hackers called “the Brigade of Hell” attacked the blog of Valery Novodvorskaya. Hacker victims include political and commercial bloggers alike and the deletion and falsification of content on online journals still goes unpunished.

According to historian Vladimir Pribylovsky, who has closely investigated hacker attacks on bloggers, this group’s financing is controlled by Timofey Shevyakov, leading analyst of the Kremlin website Politonline.ru and former employee of the pro-Kremlin research institute Foundation for Effective Politics.

Control and Deletion of Content

The unrest on Manezhnaya Square on December 11, 2010 provoked a rise in attention paid to the Runet, particularly regarding any information of a nationalistic persuasion. Representatives of the website Vkontakte announced that their moderators were working in cooperation with the police and FSB to delete “dangerous” content. Until then, the site had admitted but not specified the level of cooperation with law enforcement agencies, and now the security services speak openly of monitoring social websites and tracing the IP addresses of people who, in their opinion, are inciting hostility.

Vkontakte was noted for deleting content from its pages more broadly. After the explosion in the Raspadskaya Mine, the website’s management deleted a group created in sympathy for the victims that numbered more than 6000 members when it was deleted. Last July, the group Antireligia (about 8000 members) was also deleted.

Among other measures used against online activists was the incident of Dmitri Gudkov’s car, which was smashed up after Gudkov posted a video titled “Our Gulf of Mexico” about an oil well explosion that the authorities did not react to in any way at all.

Regardless of the fact that the Russian government has staged a series of serious attacks to limit the activities of Internet users, the Runet continues to grow, unite and discuss the most varied topics all the same. It’s possible that the government will realize that controlling freedom of expression is extremely difficult – not only because of the public’s stubbornness, but also because limiting online freedom could not only hinder regional and national debates but also harm the reputation of Russia in the global arena.

Demonstration organizer Elena Prikhodina of the Solidarity opposition movement said that the event, dubbed the Day of Disbelief, was dedicated to the so-called “Ryazan training exercises” held on September 22, 1999. Skeptics of the official explanation for the chain of deadly bombings – that the culprits were Chechen militants – cite the incident in Ryazan as evidence that the Russian Federal Security Services (FSB) were behind the bombings. They specifically accuse Vladimir Putin – who spent a year as head of the FSB until his appointment as Prime Minister in August 1999 – of being directly involved.

Participants of the demonstration gathered on Moscow’s Chistoprudny Boulevard and held posters reading “We don’t believe the state version of the explosions,” “Ryazan. We don’t believe,” and “The FSB is hiding the truth. The casualties Anna Politkovskaya, Yury Shchekochikhin, Sergei Yushenkov, Alexander Litvinenko searched for this truth,” among others.

Journalist Anna Politkovskaya, former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, and Duma members Yury Shchekochikhin and Sergei Yushenkov were all assassinated (in Shchekochikhin’s case, suspected to have been assassinated) between 2003 and 2006. Each had investigated the bombings and suspected that the FSB was to blame.

Another demonstration organizer, Mikhail Kriger, noted in his speech to the crowd that the bombings played a key role in Vladimir Putin’s first presidential campaign. Blaming the attacks on Chechen militants became the official basis for beginning the Second Chechen War, which greatly boosted Putin’s popularity, thus effectively aiding in his election. That potential motive, together with a wealth of evidence of foul play on the part of the Russian authorities, points to the FSB and Putin as perpetrators of the bombings, say skeptics of the government’s response.

Putin has written off the charges as “delirious nonsense,” but requests by relatives of victims of the attacks and others for an independent investigation continue to go unanswered.

Tuesday’s rally marked the eleventh iteration of the opposition’s Strategy 31 campaign. About 2000 people came out to Moscow’s Triumfalnaya Square to take part in the event, making it the largest rally in the campaign’s history.

As with the previous ten rallies, Moscow city authorities turned down an application by Strategy 31 organizers to obtain legal sanction to hold the event. Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov defended this permission-based system in a session of the city government earlier in the day, saying that the city’s decision to allow or disallow any given rally is not due to any “particular love” for certain rally organizers, but to considerations for public safety.

“Before every event in the capital, we take all necessary organizational measures to assure total safety for the people,” said the mayor, noting that anyone who wishes to hold a demonstration can file an application with the city and receive a decision within ten days.

The system will remain as it is, he went on, “and in the future we will continue to carry out this work in accordance with the law.”

“We will now allow chaos in Moscow,” Luzhkov stressed.

Luzhkov’s statements appear to contradict the Russian federal law that governs rallies, marches and demonstrations, which requires only a notification – not an application for permission – to be filed with the city in order to hold such an event.

Tuesday’s rally was scheduled to begin at 6:00 pm, and by that time Triumfalnaya Square had already been completely cordoned off by OMON riot police and internal military forces. According to a Kasparov.ru correspondent, the police left no free space for ralliers to gather. About 50 police buses bordered the perimeter of the square, and police blocked all pedestrians from entering. Part of the sidewalk between the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall and Triumfalnaya Square, where Strategy 31 ralliers have previously gathered when the square itself was blocked off, was also cordoned off.

Strategy 31 organizers issued a statement of concern on Tuesday morning regarding an interview with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin that had been published the day before. In the interview, the prime minister charged that the real goal of Strategy 31 participants “is to get bludgeoned upside the head,” and that ralliers routinely provoke police into acting violently. In their response, rally organizers rejected the accusation and stated that any “possible incidents” of violence at the rally would be Putin’s personal responsibility.

At the same time, Moscow City Police Chief Vladimir Kolokoltsev did promise to train his officers to detain activists using less painful methods. There was no apparent option to simply not detain any ralliers at all – Deputy Police Chief Vyacheslav Kozlov said that the unsanctioned rally would be duly broken up.

A three-person delegation from the European Parliament, headed by Human Rights Committee Chairwoman Heidi Hautala, was present at the rally at the invitation of Strategy 31 organizers. Deputy Chief Kozlov said ahead of time that the delegates would not be excluded from possible detention.

According to a count by Kasparov.ru correspondents, approximately 2000 ralliers gathered on Triumfalnaya Square despite the heavy police presence and the fact that the square itself is almost entirely barricaded off for construction. Nevertheless, participants managed to rally for nearly two and a half hours, chanting opposition slogans that called for Putin to step down and for the 31st article of the Russian constitution, which guarantees free assembly, to be observed.

Moscow city police and Federal Security Service (FSB) agents reportedly created a jam in the crowd while attempting to push the ralliers away from the square, but did not manage to break up the protest.

Kasparov.ru estimates that approximately 100 people were detained during the course of the rally, including leading opposition activists Boris Nemtsov, Ilya Yashin, Sergei Udaltsov, and Roman Dobrokhotov. Two of the three Strategy 31 organizers, Eduard Limonov and Konstantin Kosyakin, were also detained. The third organizer, Moscow Helsinki Group head and former Soviet dissident Lyudmila Alexeyeva, was present at the rally but was not detained.

Official figures from the Moscow City Police cite 70 detainees, and put the number of people present at the rally at 400 people, including 300 journalists.

Eyewitnesses noted that police did not refrain from acting violently while detaining rally participants. Several activists were seen with bloody faces after having been beaten by law enforcement agents. The first participant to be detained was an activist holding a poster picturing Russia’s symbolic two-headed eagle – one head being that of Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and the other of Vladimir Putin.

As of 10:00 pm, several of the most high-profile detainees had been released, including Nemtsov and Limonov. Nemtsov was told that he had supposedly blocked pedestrian movement during the rally and had been detained on that basis. They and several other activists were charged with “violating the established procedure for arranging or conducting a meeting, rally, demonstration, procession, or picket,” an administrative violation punishable by a small fine. As of Tuesday night, approximately 80 detainees remained in various Moscow police stations.

Strategy 31 rallies were also held on Tuesday in various cities throughout Russia, with several solidarity events also taking place in Europe. Approximately 80 out of 700 ralliers were detained in an event in St. Petersburg, and rallies were held with varying levels of success or suppression in Omsk, Yaroslav, Sochi, Voronezh, Makhachkala, and numerous other Russian cities. One event in London included the participation of refugee Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky and the widow of murdered ex-FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko, Marina Litvinenko.

The forum, which is being held in Helsinki from July 21-22, brings together approximately 100 representatives of Russian and Finnish civil society “to promote cooperation between the peoples of Finland and Russia by supporting civic initiatives for democracy, human rights, and freedom of speech,” reads the forum’s website.

On Wednesday, representatives agreed on a statement asking that Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and Tarja Halonen turn their attention to the fact that Russian society continues to be deprived of the freedom of assembly.

“We are united all across Europe in our support of Russian activists who hold peaceful demonstrations under the Strategy 31 campaign. In another week, we will again express our solidarity with the Russians in Helsinki, Prague, Brussels, Berlin, and other cities all over the continent,” reads the statement. “We call upon you, President Medvedev, to ensure freedom of assembly both on July 31 and in the future.”

Forum participants also expressed concern over new federal legislation that would greatly expand the authority of the Russian Federal Security Services (FSB). Such legislation, said the participants, contradicts both the Russian constitution and international norms, and therefore should not be signed into law by the Russian president.

The statement also remarks upon the continued persecution of human rights advocates, participants of political movements, union leaders, and journalists in Russia.

“Instead of fighting terrorism and organized crime, thousands of law enforcement agents persecute civil and political activists, quite often under the pretense of the fight against extremism,” said the forum participants.

Civil activists from both countries expressed hope that Presidents Halonen and Medvedev would discuss these issues during their meeting on Wednesday. Whether or not they actually did remained unclear after a press conference later in the day.

The document was written by two of Solidarity’s co-leaders, former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov and former Deputy Energy Minister Vladimir Milov. As Nemtsov puts it, the pamphlet is meant “to tell the truth about the results of the rule of Putin and the tandem,” as the relationship between the prime minister and president is commonly referred to.

Immediately after the authors presented the report, its host website was hit by DDOS hacker attacks that rendered it completely inaccessible. Then, on Tuesday, police in St. Petersburg seized 100 thousand copies of the published report, a tenth of the total million that were printed by the organization.

As the Moscow Times reports:

Police seized pamphlets criticizing Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on the eve of a high-profile business forum showcasing Russia, opposition leaders said.

St. Petersburg police confiscated 100,000 copies of a new report on Putin’s decade in power co-authored by Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister, said Olga Kurnosova, head of the local branch of the opposition United Civil Front.

Kurnosova and Nemtsov contended that police were trying to keep the 32-page report [in PDF form; 48 in MS Word form – ed.] from the public and visitors at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, which started Thursday.

“The police had the task of preventing the distribution of the report during the forum among its participants and citizens,” Kurnosova said.

St. Petersburg police declined to comment.

Police held the driver of the vehicle that was delivering the pamphlets for several hours, Kurnosova said.

She said police told her that they had sent the pamphlet to be checked for evidence of extremism — a tactic that opposition politicians say authorities sometimes use to stifle criticism — and that the check would take two or three days.

Nemtsov has co-written several reports highlighting corruption and other problems that he contends have gotten worse since Putin was elected president in 2000.

On Thursday, Nemtsov wrote on his blog that another 100 thousand copies of the report had been confiscated from the printing house by Federal Security Service (FSB) officers:

Instead of arguing with the theses in the report, denying the basis of the theses, they decided to show their effectiveness by acting in a Putin-like manner. Grossly violating citizens’ right to information, they decided, like in the good old days, to liquidate the opposition’s literature.

The reason is that facts and figures of the true results of Putin’s rule are laid out in the report. They tell us that they’ve built an effective state, while in fact, the level of corruption has reached monstrous proportions (on the level of the most backward African countries) in these ten years of rule. They assure us that the birth rate is rising, and that the death rate is falling – as a matter of fact, under Putin, Russia has been losing half a million people per year. They tell us that he has gained victory over the oligarchs and poverty – actually, there are more than 60 billionaires in the country, and 20 million poor. They tell us that Putin has pacified the Caucasus and gained victory over terror – as a matter of fact, in the ten years of his rule, the number of terrorist attacks has risen six times, and the regions of the Caucasus, receiving many millions in subsidies, have wound up outside of the Russian legal realm.

This is the truth that, in Putin’s opinion, Russians mustn’t know. This is where the actions of the security officials come from.

While distribution of the pamphlet started in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Solidarity is planning to release copies of the report all over Russia. For now, and especially given that police have apparently seized 1/5 of all of the printed pamphlets, the organization is encouraging citizens to print their own copies and distribute them in samizdat fashion.

“Putin. Results. 10 Years” is available in Russian by clicking here.

The vote was split down party lines, with the Kremlin-backed United Russia party voting as a bloc in favor of the bill. All deputies from the three other parties voted against it.

The bill was introduced by the Russian federal government on April 24. It will allow the FSB to issue preemptive warnings to individuals or groups that the agency suspects of acting in a way that could potentially become “extremist.” Such extremist activity, it claims, is on the rise in Russia today.

Specifically, the legislation will now allow the FSB to employ “special preventative measures” in order to “eliminate causes and conditions that are conducive to the realization of threats to security” and to issue “official warning notifications about the inadmissibility of actions that bring about the creation of causes of, and which create the conditions for, committing crime.”

What does that mean? In principle, it means that the FSB can do whatever it decides must be done to prevent situations that, theoretically, could lead to a crime being committed.

What that’s going to look like in practice remains to be seen. Experts warn that the legislation is so vague that the agency could easily use it to severely impede upon normal social activism and the normal operation of the press, leading to greater self-censorship by anyone critical of government policy. This concern stems from the fact that allegations of extremism are routinely used by Russian law enforcement agents to stifle legal forms of dissent by human rights activists, oppositionists, artists, journalists, and others.

Vladimir Lukin, the federal human rights ombudsman reappointed by President Dmitri Medvedev in 2009, said that the law was dangerous and discredits the FSB. But calls by critics to veto the legislation expect to go unheeded by the president, as it was the federal government that introduced the bill in the first place.

Oleg Ptashkin, leader of an independent journalists trade union, said in a press conference in Moscow on Tuesday that the managers of numerous media outlets were using the global economic crisis as an excuse to hire journalists as independent contractors instead of normal employees. Ptashkin, who used to work for Russia’s state-controlled Channel One TV until he was illegally fired, said that these kinds of contracts violate the rights of media workers and that his union is working on an initiative to ban the practice.

Igor Trunov, a lawyer for the trade union, said that the Russian government has recently been using a wide variety of measures to put pressure on journalists and the media. Among such measures, he said, have been police raids on editorial offices, evictions, and libel and defamation suits. Last month, for example, the editorial offices of the New Times magazine were raided after an article was published accusing an elite subdivision of the OMON riot police of using migrant workers for slave labor. The raid was condemned by journalism watchdog groups worldwide, but the police justified their actions by accusing the publication of poor-quality journalism.

New legislation expected to be adopted soon by the Russian State Duma that allows the Federal Security Service (FSB) to issue preemptive warnings to anyone suspected of acting in a way that might lead to extremist behavior is one of the most serious blows to free speech and democracy facing the country right now, Trunov went on. The bill’s wording is so vague, he said, that it would allow police to issue a few such warnings and then arrest a publication’s editor-in-chief for a fifteen day term.

Shortcomings in current Russian law would make it virtually impossible to appeal such decisions, the lawyer added.

Ptashkin said that the union is appealing to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev with a request to veto the bill.